March is the month we honor women in American History. I’m always a bit cynical about taking a slice out of our calendars to honor women (or for last month, honoring Black history), when I would be happy honoring these people and their gifts all year long. The fact that we don’t have a “National White Guy History Month” speaks volumes, but this is where we are…
I joined the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) in 1998, as I was getting increasingly engaged with the ocean noise issue. Acoustics is a rangy subject; from architectural and biomedical acoustics, to musical and computational acoustics. The tracks I mostly follow are “Underwater Acoustics,” and “Animal Bioacoustics.”
In 1998, with the exception of the “Speech and Language” track, the preponderance of ASA members were “pencil-pocket white guys with high-water pants” steeped in physics and math (and from a biological standpoint, considered animals as mostly “input devices”). The Animal Bioacoustics (AB) track was thick with insects, birds, frogs, some dolphins, and a bit of fish – and about 80% men.
The few exceptions to ‘the guy thing’ included Marty Hastings, who was working on the impacts of noise on marine life; expressing the metrics of acoustical “Energy Flux Density;” and with Art Popper, the effects of sound and noise on fishes. Cheryl Coombs was doing some interesting work on cetacean skull morphology, and the hearing physiology and neurobiology of fishes (also with Art Popper).
Darlene Ketten was doing some excellent mathematical modeling of the inner ears of whales – although one of my favorites of Darlene’s studies was “Experimental Measures of Blasts and Acoustic Trauma in Marine Mammals” wherein the Office of Naval Research provided her with frozen carcasses of various stranded marine mammals (dolphins, harbor porpoises, and pinnipeds), a test pond, and some explosives, where she did a really granular study on the physiological effects of blast trauma on the carcasses. Her work was useful in determining impulse impact mitigation and noise exposure guidelines for marine mammals.
Another bright light in the AB room was Anne Bowles, a senior scientist at Hubbs-Seaworld Research Institute, who worked a lot on animal behavioral responses to noise exposure. But prior to 2000, the ASA meetings were a bit drab for me because my not having an advanced degree, most of the Pencil Pockets didn’t want me in on their extra-conference discussions (where most of the real work gets done). They also didn’t want to caucus with anybody they were not publishing with – probably for competitive reasons.
This was about to change. During the public hearings about the US Navy’s SURTASS-LFA proposal there was a mass stranding of beaked whales in the Bahamas – coincident to a Naval exercises in the area. This put the whole ocean noise issue up on the public’s sonar, and soon a lot of women were studying marine mammals and ocean noise. The Animal Bio track began filling up with marine mammal-focused research (I published a piece in 2002 reminding folks that there were other animals using sound in the sea). But more to the point of this newsletter, the room began filling up with women.
To this day the ASA Animal Bioacoustics room is about 60% women. And the climate has changed significantly. There is much more collegiality, and there is a lot of excellent work being advanced through this. I could write volumes about the fabulous work being done by Susan Parks, Colleen Reichsmuth, Marie Rosch, Erica Statterman, Ana Širović, Laura Kloepper, and a passel of others. And scanning through the last few years of the ASA Conference presentation schedules, well over 70% of the AB papers are being presented by women.
In the context of the “National Woman’s History Month,” we need to pay attention to this. The depth and breadth of the current AB Inquiry did not involve confrontation or competition, rather it was soaked up from below, through cooperation toward a need for common understandings in our field – driven by the many women I respect and honor. And not just in the month of March.
(Belva Ann Lockwood was one of my forebears on my mother’s side.)
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